Recent Reading

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Seems like these book blurb columns involve a lot of "hurry up and
wait," or vice versa. Last one was
August 9, and before that
August 4,
August 1, and
July 31, 2015. At that point I was so backlogged I was able to pump
out four 40-book posts in a little more than a week. I don't have nearly
that much backlog now -- certainly enough for one more post, but at the
moment a bit shy of two (current backlog count is 61, including a couple
books that won't be out until April). Still, if I keep researching, I
may get that third post.

I'm so far behind that I've managed to read several of these books:
Padraig O'Malley: The Two-State Delusion, Roberto Vivo: War:
A Crime Against Humanity, and Sarah Vowell: Lafayette in the
Somewhat United States. I've also started Jane Mayer: Dark
Money, and have Robert J Gordon: The Rise and Fall of American
Growth and Joseph Stiglitz: Rewriting the Rules of the
American Economy waiting on the shelf.

Diane Ackerman: The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us
(2014; paperback, 2015, WW Norton): She has written poetry, children's
books, and some fifteen non-fiction books, some quite personal but a
couple taking on very broad topics -- like A Natural History of the
Senses (1990) and A Natural History of Love (1994). This
one explores the many ways humans have reshaped the world to their own
tastes and interests, an extraordinarily profound story, one that's
hard to wrap one's mind around if only because the change has been so
pervasive.

Mary Beard: SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015,
Liveright): A history described both as sweeping and concise (608 pp)
of Rome and its Empire from foundation up to 212 CE when Caracalla
extended Roman citizenship to all non-slaves throughout the empire --
as good a date as any to avoid having to deal with the Empire's
decline and fall.

Bill Bryson: The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an
American in Britain (2016, Doubleday): An American who writes
humorous books about the English language and travels (thus far to
English-speaking countries) and occasionally stretches for something
like A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003). Born in Iowa,
he's spent most of his adult life in Great Britain, writing Notes
From a Small Island (1996) before moving back to the US, and now
this second travelogue to Britain after returning. Probably charming
and amusing, smart too.

Hillel Cohen: Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929
(paperback, 2015, Brandeis): Israeli author, has written two important
books on Arab collaborators before and after Israel's founding -- Army
of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration and Zionism, 1917-1948 (2008),
and Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs,
1948-1967 (2010, both University of California Press) -- reviews the
pivotal 1929 Arab riots, which led to expansion of the Haganah forces,
and in 1936-39 the much larger and deadlier Arab revolt. As for "year
zero," historians can pick and choose; e.g., Amy Dockser Marcus opted
for 1913 in Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
(2007, Penguin).

Michael Day: Being Berlusconi: The Rise and Fall From Cosa
Nostra to Bunga Bunga (2015, St Martin's Press): Biography
of the Italian media mogul who parlayed wealth and power into three
terms as prime minister of Italy, which helped him gain even more
wealth and power, give or take occasionally getting "bogged down by
his hubris, egotism, sexual obsessions, as well as his flagrant
disregard for the law." All the timelier given how Donald Trump
threatens to repeat the feat. By the way, Berlusconi is currently
estimated to be worth about three times what Trump is ($12-to-$4
billion), but that's after Berlusconi has been prime minister, and
before Trump becomes president.

EJ Dionne Jr: Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism From
Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (2016, Simon &
Schuster): Journalist, leans liberal, has covered politics for a
long time and written books like Why Americans Hate Politics
(1991), They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives will Dominate the
Next Political Era (1996), Stand Up, Fight Back: Republican
Toughs, Democratic Wimps, and the Politics of Revenge (2004),
Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious
Right (2008), and Our Divided Heart: The Battle for the
American Idea in an Age of Discontent (2012). Much wishful
thinking there, oft frustrated by the increasingly fervent (do I
mean desperate?) right-wing, which he finally tries to face up to
here.

Reese Ehrlich: Inside Syria: The Backstory of Their Civil War
and What the World Can Expect (2014, Pegasus): It may be
decades before anyone writes a definitive history of the many facets
of Syria's civil war, if indeed it is over then. Meanwhile, we get
small facets of the story from many scattered observers, and I doubt
this one is any different (despite the forward by Noam Chomsky, who
is nearly always right, unpleasant as that may be). Other recent
books on Syria (aside from ISIS, which are probably more numerous):
Leon Goldsmith: Cycle of Fear: Syria's Alawites in War and Peace
(2015, Hurst); Nader Hashemi/Danny Postel, eds: The Syria Dilemma
(2013, The MIT Press); Emile Hokayem: Syria's Uprising and the
Fracturing of the Levant (paperback, 2013, Routledge); David W
Lesch: Syria: The Fall of the House of Assad (rev ed, paperback,
2013, Yale University Press); Jonathan Littell: Syrian Notebooks:
Inside the Homs Uprising (2015, Verso); John McHugo: Syria: A
Recent History (paperback, 2015, Saqi); Christian Sahner:
Among the Ruins: Syria Past and Present (2014, Oxford University
Press); Bente Scheller: The Wisdom of Syria's Waiting Game: Foreign
Policy Under the Assads (2014, Hurst); Stephen Starr: Revolt in
Syria: Eye-Witness to the Uprising (rev ed, paperback, 2015,
Hurst); Samar Yazbek: The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered
Heart of Syria (paperback, 2015, Rider); Diana Darke: My House
in Damascus: An Inside View of the Syrian Revolution (paperback,
2015, Haus); Robert Fisk et al: Syria: Descent Into the Abyss
(paperback, 2015, Independent Print); Robin Yassin-Kassab/Leila
Ali-Shami: Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War
(paperback, 2016, Pluto Press).

Jack Fairweather: The Good War: Why We Couldn't Win the War
or the Peace in Afghanistan (2014, Basic Books): I remain
stumped about what was so good about the war. The fact that American
public opinion was more unified in favor of attacking Afghanistan
than Iraq didn't make a bit of difference. The war may have polled
as high as the war against Nazi Germany, but there was no depth, no
commitment, beyond the polling, and even less understanding. The
book is probably stronger on why it all went so wrong.

Richard Falk: Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope
(paperback, 2014, Just World Books): A collection of essays since
2008 when Falk was appointed United Nations Special Rapporteur on
human rights issues in Occupied Palestine (his tenure there ended
in 2014). Falk was a law professor who took an early interest in
war crimes, especially regarding the Vietnam War -- cf. Crimes
of War (1971, Random House), written and edited with Gabriel
Kolko and Robert Lifton. He also has a newer essay collection out,
Chaos and Counterrevolution: After the Arab Spring (paperback,
2015, Just World Books).

Henry A Giroux: The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking
Beyond America's Disimagination Machine (paperback, 2014, City
Lights): Canadian educator and culture critic, has written books like
Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism
(2011, Peter Lang). Essays include "America's Descent Into Madness" --
"The stories it now tells are filled with cruelty, deceit, lies,
and legitimate all manner of corruption and mayhem. The mainstream
media spin stories that are largely racist, violent, and irresponsible --
stories that celebrate power and demonize victims, all the while
camouflaging their pedagogical influence under the glossy veneer
of entertainment" -- and "The Vanishing Point of US Democracy."

Robert J Gordon: The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The
US Standard of Living Since the Civil War (2016, Princeton
University Press): For 100 years after the Civil War, technological
advances dramatically stimulated growth and raised living standards.
However, from about 1970 on, growth rates have slowed markedly, and
we seem to have entered a period of long-term stagnation. James K
Galbraith, in The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future
of Growth, made a similar argument, but this goes much deeper
into the changes wrought by the century of high growth. As for the
future, we've already seen one consequence of slack growth: to keep
profit levels up to expectations, investors have sought political
favors and increasingly engaged in predatory behaviors (something
often called financialization). Sooner or later the other shoe is
bound to drop, as workers (and non-workers) who had been promised
growth and wound up suffering from stagnation inevitably seek to
regroup. Meanwhile, as Gordon points out, things like increasing
inequality further dampen growth, further fueling the need for change.

Greg Grandin: Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's
Most Controversial Statesman (2015, Metropolitan Books): More
like America's premier war criminal, a point we need to keep stressing
as he continues to woo war-friendly politicians of both major parties.
Grandin, whose books include Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the
United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (2006), wants to
delve deeper, going beyond Kissinger's own acts to explore his influence
on America's peculiar self-conception as an empire. I'm not sure how
much neocon nonsense can really be pinned on Kissinger, but if I did
wonder this would be the place to start. Amazon thinks if you're curious
about this you'll also be interested in Niall Ferguson: Kissinger:
1923-1968: The Idealist (2015, Penguin Press). You won't be.

Ran Greenstein: Zionism and Its Discontents: A Century of
Radical Dissent in Israel/Palestine (paperback, 2014, Pluto
Press): Surveys various political movements and thinkers based in
Israel/Palestine who rejected the politics of Zionist dominance,
starting with Ahad Ha'am in the 19th century, continuing through
the Communist Party, the various Palestinian movements, and the
Matzpen movement up to the 1980s.

Ann Hagedorn: The Invisible Soldiers: How America Outsourced
Our Security (2014; paperback, 2015, Simon & Schuster):
As I recall, when Bush I set out to attack Iraq in 1990, the US
moved over 600,000 troops into position. When Bush II decided to
invade Iraq, the US went with a little over 100,000 troops. The
main difference was that in the intervening years the Military had
contracted out vast numbers of support jobs -- logistics, food,
that sort of thing. Over the course of the Iraq and Afghanistan
wars, the outsourcing expanded to security, and the mercenaries
they hired became increasingly common and unaccountable for their
actions. (You may recall, for instance, that when Fallujah first
revolted, the Americans they hung from that bridge were contractors.)
That's what this book is about. I'm a little surprised Hagedorn
wrote this book, since the main thing I had read by her was a
magnificent slice of history, Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in
America, 1919 (2007; paperback, 2008, Simon & Schuster).

Jeff Halper: War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians
and Global Pacification (paperback, 2015, Pluto Press): Head
of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, and author of one
of the most trenchant short analyses of Israel's "matrix of control"
over the Palestinians, takes a deeper look at Israel's technologies
of control, including how they are exported elsewhere in the world.

Doug Henwood: My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency
(paperback, 2015, OR Books): All the dirt on Clinton, at least as viewed
from the left, a perspective which reveals her as a corporate shill and
inveterate warmonger. Henwood mostly writes about economic issues, in
Left Business Observer. Other books tackling Clinton from the left
include: Diana Johnstone: Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary
Clinton (paperback, 2015, CounterPunch), and Liza Featherstone, ed:
False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton (paperback,
2016, Verso [June 16]).

Alistair Horne: Hubris: The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth
Century (2015, Harper): Argues that the many major wars of
what the late Gabriel Kolko summed um as Century of War (1994)
turned on excessive hubris of one side or the other ("In Greek tragedy,
hubris is excessive human pride that challenges the gods and ultimately
leads to total destruction of the offender" -- in reality the US has
been a repeat offender without paying the ultimate price). Huge topic,
but to provide depth of battle detail Horne limits his study to six
cases: Tsushima (1905), Mononhan (1939), Moscow (1941), Midway (1942),
Korea (1950), and Dien Bien Phu (1954).

Michael Hudson: Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites
and Debt Destroy the Global Economy (paperback, 2015, Islet):
Unorthodox economist, has seen this coming for a long time and
written many books about it -- most recently The Bubble and
Beyond: Fictitious Capital, Debt Deflation and Global Crisis
(2012), and more presciently an essay on "the coming real estate
collapse" in 2006. As I've tried to point out, the function of
debt today has little to do with putting savings to productive
work, and much to do with allowing people who can't afford it to
keep up appearances until they crash. Needless to say, this is
unsustainable -- not that governments haven't struggled heroically
to keep the bankers solvent.

Rafael Lefevre: Ashes of Hama: The Muslim Brotherhood in
Syria (2013, Oxford University Press): I pulled this out of
the long list of Syria books (see Reese Ehrlich) because it stands
out: the focus is on the 1982 Hama uprising and Hafez Assad's brutal
suppression (over 20,000 killed, mostly in an artillery barrage of
the liberated city). The Muslim Brotherhood led the uprising, and
returned two decades later as an activist faction in Syria's "Arab
Spring" demonstrations -- also met brutally, resulting in the civil
war that has killed another 200,000 (not that any of these estimates
are proven).

Les Leopold: Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic
Justice (paperback, 2015, The Labor Institute Press): Labor
economist, previously wrote a couple of primers on how Wall Street has
ripped off America -- The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game
of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity
(2009), and How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour: Why Hedge Funds
Get Away With Siphoning Off America's Wealth (2013). Has lots of
"easy-to-understand charts and graphs," goes beyond explaining predatory
finance to note how other key issues ("from climate change to the exploding
prison population") are connected to economic inequality, and offers
activists a guide for doing something about this central problem.

Mike Martin: An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand
Conflict, 1978-2012 (2014, Oxford University Press): Author
was attached to British forces occupying Helmand in 2006 -- a Pashtun
province on the southern border of Afghanistan, also the locale for
Rajiv Chandrasekaran: Little America: The War Within the War for
Afghanistan (2012, Knopf) -- but speaks Pashto and was able to
record the bewildered thoughts of the locals, as well as the equally
confused thinking of the occupiers. The levels of misunderstanding
here should give anyone pause. Noteworthy here that he extends his
coverage of the conflict to include both Soviet and US/UK forces,
occupations with more than a little in common.

Paul Mason: Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
(2016, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Argues that capitalism will change
in the near future, mutating into something new, shifting the economy
away from its basis on "markets, wages, and private ownership." He
adds, "This is the first time in human history in which, equipped
with an understanding of what is happening around us, we can predict
and shape the future." I have no idea how he works this out, but I
started thinking about "post-capitalism" back in the 1990s. In my
case the initial insight was the realization that it is possible to
engineer economic systems and thereby consciously direct development
instead of waiting for the invisible hand to lead us around. I also
realized that the infinite growth required by capitalism must sooner
or later give way to ecological limits. These appear to be common
themes, but of course the devil's in the details. I would reject,
for instance, Hayek's rule that all planning leads to tyranny, but
I don't think you can just hand-wave that; there's too much history
to the contrary.

Jane Mayer: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires
Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016, Doubleday): Give
a guy a billion dollars and all of a sudden he thinks he can recruit
some politicians and hoodwink the public into voting fot them. It's
really just a case of extraordinary hubris, a sense of self-appointed
privilege combined with utter disdain for democracy. Take the Kochs,
for instance -- Mayer has already reported on them in The New
Yorker, and they seem to account for a big chunk of this book,
but they are hardly alone. As I recall, Newt Gingrich blamed his loss
to Mitt Romney in 2012 to only having one billionaire backer vs. five
for Romney. In this state of corruption, sometimes a handful of voters
can shape history, maybe even prevent democracy from working to the
benefit of the majority.

Sean McMeekin: The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the
Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923 (2015, Penguin):
The old adage is "history is written by the victors" -- a rule which
has served to distort and largely bury one of the major stories of the
early 20th century: the destruction of the Ottoman Empire. Even David
Fromkin's brilliant A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern
Middle East, 1914-1922 skips over the revolt of the Young Turks
and the two Balkan Wars that set the stage for the Ottoman entry into
the Great War, which has the effect of making much of what the Ottoman
triumvirate did during the war seem nonsensical (and possibly insane).
McMeekin attempts to correct this partly by starting earlier, but also
by researching deeper into newly opened Ottoman and Russian archives.
But also, I suspect, because history has finally shown the Anglo-French
"victory" to be hollow and bitter indeed.

Aaron David Miller: The End of Greatness: Why America Can't
Have (and Doesn't Want) Another Great President (2014, St
Martin's Press): Washington on the cover. His most striking trait
was a desire to be seen as disinterested, a leader who only sees to
the public interest, never to his personal one. Needless to say,
such people are scarce today, not so much because they don't exist
as because they don't promote themselves in the manner of would-be
presidents. On the other hand, there are great egos who would dispute
this thesis, notably Donald Trump, who hope to lead a nation to its
greatness, doing all manner of great things. For such cases, I can
imagine two books: one explaining why they will fail, the other why
what they sought was never desirable in the first place. I doubt
that Miller has written either.

Ian Millhiser: Injustices: The Supreme Court's History of
Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted (2015,
Nation Books): Reminds us that throughout history the Supreme Court
has more often than not been an entrenched conservative activist --
it is only thanks to Franklin Roosevelt (and a few successors, with
Nixon starting the revanchist return) that we have been fortunate
enough to have grown up with a Court that actually expanded human
rights. Of course, the recent growth of the conservative cabal has
given the author more to complain about. Indeed, the subtitle could
well be the Roberts' Court's motto.

David Niose: Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America
From the Attack on Reason (2014, St Martin's Griffin):
Legal director of the American Humanist Association, has focused
defending the secular nature of American democracy -- his previous
book was Nonbeliever Nation: The Rise of Secular Americans
(2012; paperback, 2013, St Martin's Griffin) -- but is worried not
just by the right's religiosity but by its increasingly dogmatic
attacks on reason.

Padraig O'Malley: The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine --
A Tale of Two Narratives (2015, Viking): Author has extensive
experience in the reconciliation of conflicts in Northern Ireland and
South Africa, giving him some perspective here. Hard to tell whether
the focus on competing narratives is just a license to spin bullshit,
but he's right that the power imbalance is what precludes every effort
at reconciliation. Actually, I'm curious how he works this out -- as
someone who occasionally thinks of writing a book along these lines:
why is something so seemingly easy to reason out so impossible for
the people who need to do it? The answer, of course, has to do with
relative power: in particular, the one side who feel they don't have
to do anything.

Dirk Philipsen: The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule
the World and What do Do About It (2015, Princeton University
Press): Gross Domestic Product is a measurement of the overall size
of an economy (usually expressed per capita), but it is at best a
very coarse number, tied to growth in marketable goods and services,
but not so much to a better, let alone a sustainable, standard of
living. Many other writers have questioned the value of GDP as a
measurement; e.g., Joseph E Stiglitz, et al., Mismeasuring Our
Lives: Why GDP Doesn't Add Up (2010).

Ted Rall: After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as
Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan (2014, Hill &
Wang): A "graphic journalist," Rall made two extended trips to
Afghanistan, one shortly after 9/11, the other ten years later,
recording his observations here, as well as some history -- if
you don't know it, at least it goes down fast and easy. Recent
Rall books include The Book of Obama: From Hope and Change
to the Age of Revolt (paperback, 2012, Seven Stories Press),
and Silk Road to Ruin: Why Central Asia Is the Next Middle
East (2nd ed, paperback, 2014, NBM Publishing). Before that,
The Anti-American Manifesto (paperback, 2010, Seven
Stories Press), which I found excessive, shrill, unfunny. More
recently, Rall wrote and illustrated Snowden (paperback,
2015, Seven Stories Press) and Bernie (paperback, 2016,
Seven Stories Press).

Pierre Razoux: The Iran-Iraq War (2015, Belknap Press):
Big (688 pp) book on one of the largest and longest wars of the last
fifty years, lasting from 1980-88, costing close to a million lives --
little understood in the West, the US in particular taking an attitude
that both sides should kill off the other. This book evidently goes
beyond the immediate conflict to look at how other nations related to,
and encouraged, the war. Also available: Williamson Murray/Kevin M
Woods: The Iran-Iraq War: A Military and Strategic History
(paperback, 2014, Cambridge University Press). Before these books,
the standard was probably Dilip Hiro: The Longest War: The Iran-Iraq
Military Conflict (paperback, 1990, Routledge).

Robert B Reich: Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the
Few (2015, Alfred A Knopf): Supposedly one of Bill Clinton's
longtime buds, taught government, staked out his politics in 1989
with The Resurgent Liberal, then in 1991 wrote The Work
of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism
which contain two major concepts, one spectacularly wrong (his
idea that as trade policies liberalize the US will more than make
up losses in manufacturing jobs with new "symbolic manipulator"
jobs), the other alarmingly right (that the rich were withdrawing
from community life to their gated communities and retreats, from
which they will cease to care about the fate of the lower classes).
Clinton liked this thinking so much he made Reich Secretary of
Labor, a job Reich filled capably if not exactly happily (cf. his
memoir, Locked in the Cabinet). Since leaving Clinton, he
has continued to wobble leftward, writing optimistic books about
politics (Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America
in 2004) and business (Supercapitalism in 2007), on the
other hand reacting when it all goes wrong (Aftershock in
2010 and Beyond Outrage in 2012, the subtitle still ending
with How to Fix It. So figure this as more of everything:
after all, the only thing wrong with capitalism is the capitalists,
who somehow in their personal greed forgot that the magic system
is supposed to make life better for everyone.

Dennis Ross: Doomed to Succeed: The US-Israel Relationship
From Truman to Obama (2015, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Author
has been an advisor to three US presidents helping them to screw up
numerous efforts to bridge the Israel-Palestine conflict, and in the
meantime has worked for Israeli think tanks, his most consistent
allegiance. In other words, he is an American who can always be
counted on to take the position that "Israel knows best" -- his
maxim for reconstructing a longer stretch of history. ("Ross points
out how rarely lessons were learned and how distancing the United
States from Israel in the Eisenhower, Nixon, Bush, and Obama
administrations never yielded any benefits and why that lesson
has never been learned.") If the title seems oblique, read it
this way: the surest way to doom any chance for peace for Israel
and Palestine is to involve Dennis Ross.

Andrew Sayer: Why We Can't Afford the Rich (2015,
Policy Press): Shows how the rich ("the top 1%") have used their
political clout "to siphon off wealth produced by others," and
goes further to argue that their predation is something the rest
of us can no longer afford -- a far cry from the common notion
that we are so obligated to the "job creator" class that we need
to sacrifice our own well being to stroke their egos. Author has
previously written books like: Radical Political Economy:
Critique and Reformulation (1995), The Moral Significance
of Class (2005), and Why Things Matter to People: Social
Science, Values and Ethical Life (2011).

Kevin Sites: Swimming With Warlords: A Dozen-Year Journey
Across the Afghan War (paperback, 2014, Harper Perennial):
War reporter, previously wrote In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year,
Twenty Wars (paperback, 2007, Harper Perennial), and The
Things They Cannot Say: Stories Soldiers Won't Tell You About What
They've Seen, Done or Failed to Do in War (paperback, 2013,
Harper Perennial). Sites first entered Afghanistan to join the
Northern Alliance in 2001, and on his sixth tour retraced his
footsteps in 2013 to ask what has changed. Some stuff, but it's
not clear for the better.

Timothy Snyder: Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and
Warning (2015, Tim Duggan): The recent author of Bloodlands:
Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010) narrows his focus on the
Nazi Judeocide, not just what happened but on why. He comes up with a
rather original theory of Hitler's mind, something about resources and
ecology, and adds that "our world is closer to Hitler's than we like
to admit, and saving it requires us to see the Holocaust as it was" --
hence the "warning." I wonder whether obsessing on the need to "save
the world" isn't itself an invitation to overreach (not to mention
overkill). But then I tend to think of the Holocaust as a contingent
quirk of history, not some cosmological constant.

Joseph E Stiglitz: Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy:
An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity (paperback, 2015,
WW Norton): Practical proposals for reducing inequality, restoring
the sense that the United States is "the land of opportunity, a place
where anyone can achieve success and a better life through hard work
and determination." That reputation has been blighted by stagnation
as the rich have managed to use their political and economic clout to
capture an ever-increasing share of the nation's wealth. Stiglitz,
one of our finest economists (Krugman's preferred term is "insanely
great"), has been working on this problem for a while now, including
his books The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society
Endangers Our Future (2012), and The Great Divide: Unequal
Societies and What We Can Do About Them (2015).

Roberto Vivo: War: A Crime Against Humanity (paperback,
2015, Hojas del Sur): Born in Uruguay, CEO of "a global social communications
media firm" in Buenos Aires, has put together a global history and virtual
legal brief to outlaw war. The impulse is sensible -- common recognition
of the law, whether from respect or fear, is the main reason we haven't
sunk into a Hobbesian "war of all against all" mire -- and indeed at some
points enjoyed broad international support. That's probably true today,
too, but it only takes one country that insists on flexing its muscles
and putting its self-interest above peaceful coexistence to spoil the
understanding. In the 1930s, for instance, Germany and Japan were such
outlaw countries. Today it's mostly the United States and Israel (and
one could argue Saudi Arabia, Russia, and/or Turkey). Vivo makes his
case logically and succinctly, but he doesn't really face up to the
infantile nations that put so much stock in their warmaking skills and
so little in international law.

Sarah Vowell: Lafayette in the Somewhat United States
(2015, Riverhead): Starting with an MA in Art History, she went into
radio, wrote some essays, and found a niche writing popular history,
starting with Assassination Vacation, her travelogue to the
historical sites of murdered presidents. Since then her histories
have become more conventional: The Wordy Shipmates (2005,
on the Puritans), and Unfamiliar Fishes (on the takeover of
Hawaii). Here she recounts the American Revolution by focusing on
Washington's French sidekick, and the early nation viewed from
Lafayette's 1824 return visit.

Lawrence Wright: Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin,
and Sadat at Camp David (2014, Knopf; paperback, 2015, Vintage
Books): A day-by-day account of the 1979 Camp David negotiations between
Egypt and Israel over return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt and, as it
turns out, damn little else -- still, the only significant time that
Israel could be bothered to sign a peace agreement with a neighbor. (I
don't much count the later treaty with Jordan.) Wright previously wrote
The Leaning Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006, Knopf),
a valuable book on the thinking behind the attack.